The Ride

By Nasha Khan

Note: following is a piece that I wrote during the Gaza massacre last summer as I stared into an image of a young boy biking between the rubble under a clear sky. The image was taken during the temporary ceasefire after which more chaos ensued.

We coast along the road

Tires grazing, skidding

against Tuesday’s bath

The stained remains of my neighbor’s child

through tattered bits of dirty red

The doll her father gave on this bloody ‘Eid

all that is left

 

Alongside me, my new friend

Al Amin, the Truthful

Orphaned in a fortnight too

The younger one of us, he speaks

with wisdom I wish not to seek

His mother’s severed head rests upon the very bed

on which he used to sleep

 

Rubble everywhere we go,

So we take another road

Clean up time before the wired silence

breaks the brutish breath of dusky air

in the intimacy of death’s toll

At every turn it is the same

No peace except the still faces of the slain

 

This July the wind feels warmer than before

But what is above spurns what is below

The clear sky, its blue bright, says nothing

of the crimson sheet that bonds the living to the near dead

Another day gone, another night come

Signs for those who think save one

whose wings stretch through bloated clouds

 

And the Angel’s Horn again explodes.

 

Nasha Khan is a freelance writer from California. She holds a master’s degree in writing from the University of Southern California. Her postgraduate studies have taken her overseas to study under noted writers at the University of Cambridge. She has lived in four countries, worked in two, traveled through a dozen odd, and lived to tell the tales. Currently she is working on her second manuscript.